VIZAGAPATAM.
Sankránti. The eaves of these huts nearly reach the ground and make a shelter for cattle; the household cooking is usually done beneath them also, and the fires thus started often burn down a whole hamlet. Inside the one room is a broad shelf, five feet from the ground, where lumber is stored and valuables are hidden.
Further north, the circular house gives place to a continuous line of connected huts, their roofs thatched with cholam-straw or grass and all of the same height and pitch, so made that the whole side of a street looks like one house. These have a loft under the rafters which serves the same purposes as the shelf in the circular huts. The granaries are everywhere a distinctive feature, being circular wattle-and-daub constructions quite separate from the houses. The bottoms of the front door-posts are universally and regularly marked on Fridays with saffron and kunkumam in honour of Lakshmi.
In the Agency, the villages are often tiny temporary affairs, the population moving on as the needs of kondapódu (p. 111) dictate. Many of them contain only a couple of huts and a cattle-byre.Where more permanent, they generally consist of one main street flanked on either side by a continuous row of connected huts similar to those just described, behind which are the dwellings of the Dombus and other inferior castes. Uriya Bráhmans and Sondis (if any) live in superior quarters apart. Round many houses runs a neat bamboo wattle fence, some six feet high, which is probably a relic of the days when tigers were common and aggressive. The Savaras and Kuttiya Khonds are fond of putting their habitations on hill-tops. The village boundary (sandhi) is held in some honour and is often marked by a post at which, when cholera threatens to intrude, sacrifices are made, or a string of leaves and crows' or peacocks' feathers is hung across the path, or a broom is suspended to sweep away all harm.
In the plains, the standard of dress is far lower than in the southern districts. Both the men and women of all but the richer classes wear the coarsest cloths, made usually of home-spun cotton woven by the local weavers. These are narrower than in the Tamil country (so narrow, in fact, that the ladies of some castes wear a langúti underneath them) and when at work in the fields the women tuck them between their legs and pull them up in front to a height which would shock their southern sisters. The men's langútis, on the other hand, are not the inadequate rags in use in the Tamil country, but broad and flowing affairs which often reach to their knees both before and behind, and the ends of which flap about so much that they are often tucked into
68
